Allen Zhang the creator of WeChat (I am a fangirl) gave a 2 hr long speech yesterday abt his thoughts on the product on the eve of its 10th anniversary.

It's a lot on Channels (the new video function in WeChat).

Here are my notes & comments in parentheses:

WeChat daily usage looks like this:

1.09 Bn users log in, 330mm use video chat
780mm users view Moments feed (like FB feed), 120mm users post to Moments
360mm read articles, 400mm use mini programs

Why're we going after video?
In last 5 years, users are sending 33x more video msgs in chat, 10x more videos into their Moments feed.
Not everyone can write long content, but doing video requires new acct system (current public acct system is subscription based), we tried in 2017

but didn't get too far. But since video SO obviously the big thing in next 10 yrs, we began working on it for real in 2019. (Very late, if you ask me).
Channels is NOT like your WeChat ID, which is for PRIVATE comms. It's WeChat's foray into public content.

So now, you need a new Channel ID to make content, but not view content (use your existing WeChat ID & leverage social network / relationships).
WeChat tried 3 separate internal algo teams. Found that algo rec was much worse than people rec content performance.